Trophy (18 page)

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Even though Flemming was cremated and I haven’t got a clue how you intend to get his DNA.’

‘We’ll find a way.’ Michael turned to the housekeeper: ‘What delicious grapes.’

‘Mrs Nielsen always prepares enough to feed a whole army,’ Henrik Schmidt said. ‘If it was up to her, we would be waddling rather than walking.’

Michael forced a smile, eased his chair over a groove in the floor and got up. ‘Where’s the lavatory, please?’

Henrik Schmidt rose as well. ‘Upstairs, third door on the left. Do you want me to show you?’

‘Thank you, I’ll manage,’ Michael said.

He walked quickly up the stairs and opened the door to the corridor on the left. It was like walking through a luxury hotel. There were tall, white-painted panels, green silk wallpaper and matching doors to either side. Michael opened the first door and found a guest bedroom with an untouched but made-up bed. The next door revealed an enormous bathroom with a sunken tub with steps, golden taps and murals. Roman scenes of bathing women in flimsy, damp clothes, and naked young men holding out amphorae suggestively spurting water. Colourful birds courted each other in the mosaic border. Michael opened every cupboard, but found only a pile of exclusive, fragrant towels, dressing gowns, various oils, lotions and soaps.

He closed the door to the bathroom and tried the other doors down the corridor without finding anything other than
linen cupboards, a sewing room and several identical guest bedrooms.

The last door to the left was the only one that was locked. On the doorframe someone had put up an enamelled Royal Life Guards crest with the motto
Dominus Providebit
.

*

The others were drinking coffee by the time he returned. Michael smiled at the women and sat down.

‘Coffee?’ Mrs Nielsen asked.

‘Yes, please.’

‘Coffee for the detective,’ Victor Schmidt intoned, but apparently without resentment. He winked humorously to Michael.

Maybe someone had defended him in his absence. Even Jakob Schmidt received him with a small, if still sceptical smile. It was almost like an ordinary dinner in an ordinary house with an ordinary family.

There was a light tap on his bedroom door. Michael looked at his watch and frowned. It was two fifteen in the morning and the house was as quiet as a mausoleum. Jakob Schmidt had left Pederslund at eight thirty with his brother.

They had discussed the legal implications of Flemming Caspersen’s fruitful, albeit imaginary infidelity until Victor Schmidt became too drunk and incoherent and his wife had helped him upstairs to bed. Michael had said good night to Elizabeth Caspersen outside her bedroom, which was opposite to his. Even she was slightly tipsy and, frankly, he couldn’t blame her.

Michael had drunk nothing. He was very proud of himself.

He flicked that evening’s first cigarette out of the open window. The glowing tip trailed an arc in the darkness over Jungshoved. Then he opened the door to Monika Schmidt, but blocked her path. She was now wearing some kind of negligee, one transparent layer upon another, which reached down to her bare feet. It was like butterfly wings. Michael
could see the contours of her slim, petite body against the light from the lamps in the corridor.

She had changed her perfume to something lighter, more floral – and anaesthetizing. She looked gravely up at him, but he didn’t remove his hand. A small, fearful smile played on her lips while the rest of her face was calm and expectant.

‘Are you just going to leave me standing here?’ she asked.

Michael scratched the back of his head. He had freed himself from the stiff new shirt, jacket, shoes and socks, and was standing in the cool evening air wearing only his trousers.

He tried to smile.

‘Monika, listen … I think you are … you’re a very beautiful … attractive … but …’

She performed an ironic curtsy, fluttered her long eyelashes at him and held up a bottle of Talisker and two crystal tumblers. Her thin bracelets jingled.

‘A whisky, Michael?
Snälla, snälla
, Michael. You can’t send me away now. It just wouldn’t do.’

She ducked under his outstretched arm and continued into the darkness, where her contours dissolved. Michael popped his head out and glanced up and down the dim corridor. The gap under Elizabeth Caspersen’s door was dark. There was no key in his door.

‘Doesn’t anybody ever lock their doors around here?’ he grumbled.

‘Jakob usually does,’ Monika Schmidt said behind him.

She turned on the bedside lamp, climbed up on his bed and stretched out her legs on the bedspread. She smiled and poured a whisky with a steady hand.

Michael closed the window and sat down in an armchair a safe distance from his hostess. Then he crossed his legs as if to signal that perhaps she ought to do the same. She didn’t. Instead, Monika Schmidt watched him with a little smile. She held out a glass to him, and he got up and took it.

Then she leaned back against the headboard, sighed and pulled up one leg. Michael kept his eyes on his glass. He suspected that her studied movement had caused the negligee to slide up her thigh.

‘Please don’t get me wrong, Michael,’ she said.

‘What on earth is there to get wrong, Monika?’ he asked.

He sipped his whisky without looking up. He noticed that she had pulled down the negligee so it covered her crotch.

‘Are you married?’ she asked.

Michael muttered something affirmative.

‘Happily?’

‘I think so.’

‘So there’s still such a thing as true love?’

‘I hope so.’

‘Like in the fairy tales. Children?’

Michael held up two fingers. ‘Two.’

Monika Schmidt nodded and folded her arms across her breasts.

‘Lucky woman, your wife,’ she said.

‘I’m not so sure. I know I’m the lucky one, but I don’t suppose that she is.’

She smiled, but said nothing.

‘Cheers,’ he said.

She raised her glass and took a sip. This was a different version of Monika Schmidt, he thought. Serious, balanced. Her hectic quality had gone.

‘The whole thing is insane, isn’t it, Michael?’ she said, and let her gaze glide across his naked torso with an expression of some alarm.

‘The baby in New York?’

‘Yes. Do you believe it?’ she asked.

‘I think I do. It wouldn’t be the first time a married man fathered a love child.’

‘Not Flemming.’

‘I guess he had balls and urges just like everybody else,’ Michael mumbled. ‘What more does it take?’

She looked at him gravely. ‘He wasn’t like that. He really wasn’t.’

‘If you say so.’

She nodded, emptied her glass, and refilled it immediately.

‘Michael, please don’t think ill of us.’

‘Of course not, Monika. Why would I?’

‘
Asch!
Because … we always clash. Victor … me … Victor and me, Victor and Elizabeth, Victor and Jakob. It’s not as bad as it looks. Victor is a good man, really. He’s a product of his upbringing, we all are. His father beat him
and his mother didn’t care. Do you know how he lost his eye?’

‘No.’

‘One day his father picked him up, put him on the kitchen table, told him to jump and promised to catch him. He was five years old. Victor jumped, but his father didn’t catch him and he lost his eye. His father said that would teach him never to trust anyone. And he learned that lesson all right. They were very poor. No matter how rich, powerful and comfortable Victor is now, in his head he’ll only ever be one tiny step from the abyss. He really believes that. He despises impotence, dependency and weakness because he has always had to be so strong himself. I guess that’s typical for … what’s the word? Mould breakers. Flemming was both father and brother to him, and without Flemming, he’s vulnerable and exposed. He’ll do anything to safeguard himself and Sonartek.’

‘Anything?’

She looked at him. Apparently unaware, she pulled up her leg again and Michael could see her beautiful, well-trimmed sex. He averted his eyes. Monika Schmidt frowned at him, then the penny dropped and she wrapped the bedspread around her legs.

‘Right! Now we can talk without you getting distracted. And without me getting distracted. My apologies, Michael.’

‘You said that Victor would do anything?’ he prompted her.

‘He really would.’

‘If Victor’s a mould breaker, surely he can identify with Jakob?’

She pulled a face.

‘Victor doesn’t get why Jakob won’t come and work for Sonartek. He feels that Jakob has rejected him as a father and mentor, and he doesn’t understand why his son won’t do his duty, seeing that he has given him everything. That is to say, everything
he
didn’t have. Material things, ultimately unimportant things, but like I said, he doesn’t get it.’

‘And he’s jealous of Jakob?’

‘I think so. He envies Jakob his freedom, but doesn’t realize that he can never know what that feels like because he doesn’t feel secure within himself. Jakob feels secure. Victor has to learn to see himself in both his sons rather than regard them as strangers. Do you like my boys?’

‘Yes. Very different and very alike, I think. But is that all there is to it?’

‘All what?’

‘The tension between Victor and Jakob. They don’t resemble each other physically. I would have thought it went deeper. That it’s about more than just the choice between a comfortable life and one that isn’t. Or doing your duty.’

The bedside lamp drew golden squares on her brown irises.

‘Oh, Michael …’

‘What?’

She poured more whisky into her glass and ran a weary hand across her face.

‘Michael, I think you’re a dangerous man.’

She spoke his name in Swedish where the
ch
became a short
k
, and she stressed the second syllable. It sounded really rather charming.

She yawned and stretched out. Her negligee gaped and a hard, dark brown nipple peeped out. No matter which direction Michael looked, his gaze still landed on something. It was very distracting.

‘I don’t think so,’ he mumbled.

‘But you
are
. You
see
things. I understand why Elizabeth hired you.’

She looked into space.

‘Something is wrong, Michael. Something terrible is about to happen. I know it.’

Slowly she wiped away the tears from her cheek with the back of her hand and looked at her moist hand in wonder.

‘Tell me what you think is wrong,’ he said softly.

‘I don’t know. Everything. The hunters at Pederslund.’

‘The hunters?’

‘There used to be so many. Now they hardly ever come. They were soldiers – Jakob’s and Henrik’s friends. Later it was mostly Henrik’s, even though he was never in the army. The boys loved hunting. They started some kind of boys-only club. Women were banned from their lunches and parties. Only high-class hookers and strippers were allowed. Men
need space. A woman needs to respect that, or a man feels suffocated and trapped. Most young women today don’t understand. They castrate their men by making them feel guilty. Don’t you agree, Michael?’

‘Absolutely,’ he nodded. ‘But Jakob, where does he go when he can’t find a disaster zone to work in?’

She sighed.

‘Jakob is Jakob. I don’t think he has ever needed anyone. He never cried when he was little. He preferred to play alone and yet he was the most popular boy at school because he never made any effort. Is there anything more attractive to the rest of us than someone who is self-sufficient and is at peace with themselves? We think they have a secret that they could share with us. We’re attracted to them because we hope some of it will rub off. He reminds me of Flemming. And of you.’

‘How do you mean?’

She didn’t reply.

He repeated the question and was rewarded with a low snore. Monika Schmidt was asleep.

Fuck …

Fuck, fuck, fuck!

He got up and bent over her. Watched her peaceful, quiet face. The years faded away: Monika Schmidt looked like a sleeping child. The irises twitched under the thin eyelids, the mouth was relaxed and the lips blood red. She smelled of woman and expensive perfume.

Shit!

Was he supposed to carry her back to the marital bed to her drunken, unconscious husband? Wherever he was. Or prop her up against the door, knock on it and then do a runner? Or should he just put her on the sofa in the drawing room downstairs?

He left her where she was.

*

Michael took a small digital camera, a leather case and a thin Maglite torch from the inside pocket of his jacket, opened the door and glanced at Monika Schmidt once more. He decided that she was fast asleep. He tiptoed down the corridor, opened the door to the main staircase and continued across the landing to the opposite corridor. The house was completely silent.

Outside Jakob Schmidt’s room he stopped and examined the door frame for hairs or folded pieces of paper that would fall to the floor when the door was opened. He couldn’t see any tell-tales so he pressed down the handle. The door was locked; Michael squatted down on his haunches, put the leather case on the carpet and opened it to reveal the slim, steel instruments it contained. It was an old lock and it took him less than a minute to pick it.

Though he was sure that Jakob had left Pederslund, he held his breath when he opened the door and slipped into the quiet room. He leaned against the door and got his bearings in the almost total darkness. Then he switched on his
torch and looked around a young man’s room where time had stood still for many years. There was a narrow, old-fashioned iron bedstead covered with a patchwork quilt, a bookcase with such classics as
Moby Dick, Kim, Treasure Island
and
Lord Jim
, and various military educational books that he recognized from his own bookcase. A bamboo fishing rod was mounted on the wall above the headboard and below the rod he saw the photo of the Swedish summer afternoon with Henrik and Jakob Schmidt that Flemming Caspersen had had hanging in his library. Even the frame was the same.

There was a desk marked with years of knife carvings, burns from forbidden cigarettes and rings from forbidden beer bottles. A laptop sat on the desk. Michael opened the lid and was asked to type in a password. He closed the lid again and instead opened a wardrobe filled with outdoor equipment: climbing ropes, a harness, karabiners and hiking boots, waders, sailing jackets and old uniform items, camouflage jackets and camouflage trousers, but not the military kind. There wasn’t, for instance, anything he recognized from Elizabeth Caspersen’s DVD. A sabre and a modern bayonet in its sheath hung on the inside of the wardrobe door. He found the Royal Life Guards’ full dress uniform in a plastic bag, and on top of the wardrobe a tall, fabric-covered box, which probably contained Jakob Schmidt’s bearskin headgear.

If the man with the dark, animal eyes were to find him in here now, he would be lucky to get away with a visit to
Casualty, he thought. He was more likely to end up in intensive care with feeding instructions on a Post-it note slapped on his forehead.

Gripping the torch between his teeth, he lit up the photographs on the wall and took out his camera. The curtains were closed, but even so the camera flashlight would be visible from the outside. Never mind, it couldn’t be helped. He photographed each picture several times and checked the resolution on the camera’s LED screen before he moved on.

Officer School, Class of 2001: Jakob Schmidt stood in the middle of the back row, wearing the uniform of a first lieutenant. His expression was neutral. Michael took a small step to the side and looked at a photograph of five half-naked warriors with long hair and beards standing in the desert. Their faces were partly shaded under their hats and the men’s eyes were hidden behind sunglasses. He concentrated on the man standing by himself on the far left. Tattooed, a lazy half-smile, muscular, broad shoulders and long legs. He was almost certain that it was Jakob Schmidt. Michael recognized the type: not a team player, but a useful loner. The scorpion raised its sting along the man’s neck.

Then he studied various hunting pictures from the estate. To his surprise, he recognized Henrik in several of them. Sonartek’s sales director hadn’t struck him as the outdoor type, but he seemed perfectly at home among the others at the display of the day’s bag. One of the boys. Jakob didn’t
feature, and Michael wondered whether he had taken most of the pictures.